.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
Maya Widmaier-Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
‘What fabulous monsters they are, these musketeers! Preposterous, to be sure, yet quite as believable as Picasso’s most grimly distorted portraits of real people. And distorted they are. Their wide-brimmed hats hardly manage to contain faces in which giddy eyes dance under eyebrows shaped like ears of corn, and a bearded chin is appended like a tassel to a twisted nose’ (Gert Schiff, ‘The Musketeer and His Theatrum Mundi’, pp. 11-69, in Picasso: The Last Years, 1963-1973, exh. cat., New York, 1983, p. 30).
Exuding that Baroque exuberance that characterised much of Picasso’s work during the last triumphal years of his career, Le mousquetaire conveys all the energy, humour and inventiveness the artist professed at the time. At play in the drawing one finds the two forces which propelled Picasso’s colossal artistic output in the late 1960s and early 1970s: speed of execution and vigorous expression. Swirls, scribbles and scrawls compellingly evoke the frills and curls of a Rembrandtesque character, moustached and bearded. Picasso drew the figure in a single sweep of creativity, conjuring its features through his unmistakable animated graphic style. The artist subsequently used a dark wash to lend density to the work, evoking the dramatic sombre tones of official Seventeenth Century portraiture. Picasso dedicated the work to his friend, the Doctor Jean Stéhelin, to whom he would offer a number of works at the time.
In its subject, Le mousquetaire belongs to a series of works – paintings, etchings and drawings – that Picasso devoted to the ‘musketeer’. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, this figure had become an ubiquitous character in the artist’s world. Overemphasized and comical, in Picasso’s work the musketeer played an array of roles: voyeur and lover, artist and pipe smoker, it expressed the energetic, intrepid spirit with which Picasso’s approached his old age. The artist’s last wife Jacqueline Roque later explained that Picasso had grasped the potential of the musketeer figure while perusing a Rembrandt book during a period of illness and convalescence in 1965-1966. The present drawing is dated ‘25-10-71’. At the time the artist was ninety-one. The previous year he had baffled the world with a bold exhibition at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, where he exhibited a flamboyant series of colourful, exuberant musketeers, which, hanging together, seemed to propose a sort of Picassian, delirious version of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Proposing a further exploration of a theme that, at the end of his life, Picasso would turn into countless renditions, Le mousquetaire captures the artistic vitality and fearless comic inventions that would characterise his last great triumph.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
‘What fabulous monsters they are, these musketeers! Preposterous, to be sure, yet quite as believable as Picasso’s most grimly distorted portraits of real people. And distorted they are. Their wide-brimmed hats hardly manage to contain faces in which giddy eyes dance under eyebrows shaped like ears of corn, and a bearded chin is appended like a tassel to a twisted nose’ (Gert Schiff, ‘The Musketeer and His Theatrum Mundi’, pp. 11-69, in Picasso: The Last Years, 1963-1973, exh. cat., New York, 1983, p. 30).
Exuding that Baroque exuberance that characterised much of Picasso’s work during the last triumphal years of his career, Le mousquetaire conveys all the energy, humour and inventiveness the artist professed at the time. At play in the drawing one finds the two forces which propelled Picasso’s colossal artistic output in the late 1960s and early 1970s: speed of execution and vigorous expression. Swirls, scribbles and scrawls compellingly evoke the frills and curls of a Rembrandtesque character, moustached and bearded. Picasso drew the figure in a single sweep of creativity, conjuring its features through his unmistakable animated graphic style. The artist subsequently used a dark wash to lend density to the work, evoking the dramatic sombre tones of official Seventeenth Century portraiture. Picasso dedicated the work to his friend, the Doctor Jean Stéhelin, to whom he would offer a number of works at the time.
In its subject, Le mousquetaire belongs to a series of works – paintings, etchings and drawings – that Picasso devoted to the ‘musketeer’. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, this figure had become an ubiquitous character in the artist’s world. Overemphasized and comical, in Picasso’s work the musketeer played an array of roles: voyeur and lover, artist and pipe smoker, it expressed the energetic, intrepid spirit with which Picasso’s approached his old age. The artist’s last wife Jacqueline Roque later explained that Picasso had grasped the potential of the musketeer figure while perusing a Rembrandt book during a period of illness and convalescence in 1965-1966. The present drawing is dated ‘25-10-71’. At the time the artist was ninety-one. The previous year he had baffled the world with a bold exhibition at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, where he exhibited a flamboyant series of colourful, exuberant musketeers, which, hanging together, seemed to propose a sort of Picassian, delirious version of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Proposing a further exploration of a theme that, at the end of his life, Picasso would turn into countless renditions, Le mousquetaire captures the artistic vitality and fearless comic inventions that would characterise his last great triumph.